Sue Ingleton stripped bare

COMEDY KICK ARSE! by Sue Ingleton, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 7 Alfred Place until April 18

It was a great start to the Comedy Festival - the return of Sue Ingleton to stand-up comedy in her hometown, a vintage performance from a feminist veteran. Happily she's just as outrageous as she was back in the 1970s when she made puppets out of feminine sanitary products and got Bill Rawlings pregnant.

A grandmother now, she gives sound advice on why women of her age are reverting to the missionary position. Mind you, she says she sleeps alone these days, on a fancy new bed called a tofu, and given her views on men it's hardly surprising. About the only man she actually seems to lust after is the ABC gardening guru, Peter Cundall.

Even men in the front row are fair game, particularly when she ambushes them by quietly working the crowd before the show starts, in the guise of the apparently innocuous little old lady, Edith Wise.

Edith has a wicked tongue and some very forthright political opinions. John Howard is verbally emasculated, while young Mark Latham looks promising. I'd have liked more political satire, but Edith soon does a strip on stage, and the real Sue Ingleton emerges.

Her interests reflect the direction taken over the past years by Ingleton; goddess religions, healing workshops and the new spirituality. IVF technology - egg-raping, as she calls it - is the target of her real anger.

This manifestation of the performer is curiously at odds with her third comic characterisation, as the spaced-out New Age hippie, Gemma Marina Hatchback. Gemma's still with us because she's always been into prescription drugs, not the hard stuff, and she rolls a shredded Prozac fag while she talks to us.

Her memories of the great times at occasions such as the Pine Gap demonstrations (that might be a puzzling reference to some of the younger audience members) evoke the whole 1970s climate of political love-ins. It's very funny, but there is a sense in which the satire is muddled by the nostalgia.

This is not to suggest that Ingleton's rapier tongue has lost its edge. Perhaps it has to do with the wisdom that comes with age, or maybe just the ability to take a longer view of things.

Her feminism, for example, is still hilariously confrontational. Men are still the enemy, but since they are born for war not peace, they are also their own worst enemies. Certainly laughing at them seems to reduce their threat. And one of Ingleton's most endearing qualities has always been her ability to laugh at herself.

My view of her is also coloured by affectionate nostalgia, and I hope the new generation encountering her in this festival find her as challenging and funny as do her contemporaries.